I remember Mirabella from Vanessa's memories: a gorgeous lycan with some Brazilian heritage. Last Vanessa saw the rival telepathist, Mirabella favoured skimpy, tribal dresses, and keeping her hair in thick, coarse braids.
The whole school reel backwards as I struggle with Mirabella in their minds. A pulse of energy runs through the room, rattling lockers and dispersing paper; as moisture gathers around me. Temperature plummets by its nose; frost gathers on the windows; dark clouds swirl outside in a sudden, freaky weather. Static electricity builds in the air as I wrestle Mirabella, but the battlefield isn't in either of our own minds: students and teachers of my school bumble about or kneel on the floor in different postures of torture, screaming silently at the telepathic rampage that is two werewolves' making.
For a spell longer, Mirabella keeps her hold on the minds around me. Then the spell breaks.
The whole school give a collective gasp as they are released, finding their wits again. I pass through their midst quickly to the bathroom, where I stand in front of the mirror.
There is a layer of ice over everything here too, though the mirrors are not so opaque as to be useless. A White stares back at me when I look in the glass. Her eyes are pure snow; and her hair is the same shade as her eyes with the rest of her body.
She looks White enough for one of the First Men.
***
Everyone is talking about the freaky weather. Einstein and Newton, or Henry and Norman as their names really are, are arguing over which self-made theory explains the sudden storm.
While teachers try to restore order despite being as clueless as everyone else, I glance out a window, seated in what should be my next class. I realize that, for the short moment of my psychic battle with Mirabella, there had actually been hail. Thunder booms now, loud enough to rattle the entire school structure from a sky that is still overcast; with outside temperature still being ridiculously low.
'Newton' Norman, pulling up a meteorological chart on his tablet, announces to our class of scanty students that other towns around us are having clear, sunny weather; and that the morning weather forecast for our town is no different from what these towns around us are experiencing.
'Do you think it's an alien invasion?' a younger geek kid asks Norman.
Seamus gathers up the kid and throws him out. 'Find your own class, brat,' he shouts after him.
'Claire, do you really think it was aliens?' Alicia pats my arm and rolls her eyes, smirking. She settles into the chair behind me. She was first to break free of Mirabella's telepathy: almost certainly because of her affinity to me.
I shrug, 'Might be a government experiment of some sorts,' I joke back, which was repeating some thing some other smarty-pants had said.
While Mr Ivan gets us settled down for Biology, I look through the window beside me—spotted with moisture as it is, while the realization eventually dawns on me: Claire Benning (AKA Elderwood AKA White AKA Olligrander) is a walking meteorological disaster.
In the middle of Mr Ivan's exceptionally slow class, while Alicia is nodding off and I am drawing bunnies in my notebook—to be ripped out later, I get an ear-piercing call on my cell. It is like an adrenaline shot in the quiet that scrambles the class awake.
'Sooorrrrryyyyy,' I apologize as I fish out the device. The caller ID says… Dr Simone. Is she calling about—
'Miss Benning, could you do the class a favour and turn that off?—before you get detention, that is,' Mr Ivan's nasal voice cuts through my thoughts, which are about to wander.
'Sure, sir,' I say in mock pleasantness.
Mr Ivan glances out the window, frowns and shivers, before he resumes his monologue on the migration of chromosomes in mitosis. By a different teacher, it might have been a faster class and more interesting, but Mr Ivan could reiterate a single idea over and over until even the liveliest things were dull and cold. Also, he has a Severus Snape kind of humor: precisely the lack of it.
When the recess bell rings, I am the first out the door. I fly into a bathroom cubicle and shut the door behind myself. I dial Dr Simone.
To my relief she picks on the second ring.
'Claire!' She says in a tone that is like my mom's.
'I know what you want to say—'
'No, you don't, because I have not even started. What were you thinking!' She rages. 'If you don't know, what Vanessa and Dean wanted was to keep you safe, but you don't seem to be helping.'
'Hey!' I respond, feeling my face flush with irritation. 'You don't understand—?'
'Half of what you've been through?' Dr Simone finishes for me.
The rest of my argument sublimes from my mind: that was some telepathy shit. I hastily consider the possibility, 'What are you, Dr Simone?'
'Do you think you are the only one with telepathic abilities?' Dr Simone sighs. She seems to be letting some of her guard down, sharing with me an itty-bitty secret from what might be an entire cupboard of 'Things I Don't Want Claire Benning To Know'.
But little could I have guessed at the time that that cupboard has a skeleton.
I wonder if Dr Simone is the telepathist whose power I felt when I talked with her the first day. Considering that that telepathist had called me mom, things don't add up.
Before I can probe Dr Simone, she launches off to condemning my actions antagonizing Mirabella. I don't need telepathy to tell that her walls are back in place. I would be better off getting answers from someone like Rufus, leader of the lycan huntsmen.
'Keep your head down, Claire. Be safe. Keep your pack safe!' Dr Simone counsels angrily.
A fist raps on the toilet door. 'Claire Benning?'
I reach out with telepathy, just a tiny tendril through the door. The young girl on the other side is Tisha, Marvin's sister.
Marvin is a member of Seamus and Sebastian's circle.
I return to the call but the distraction was enough. The line is dead. Dr Simone escaped me.
'Yes?' I crack the door to face Tisha, but my thoughts are pulling in different directions. I was right on a certain matter: around four months ago, Dean had taken Vanessa to a government research facility—to Dr Simone—many miles away in a different state; two states away at least.
But during the telepathic incident that had tripped off my motherly instincts, I had clearly sensed Dr Simone closer. In the course of our short phone conversation, I had tracked Dr Simone psychically. She is somewhere in the outskirts of my town where my telepathy can still reach. But before I could find her exact location, Tisha had interrupted me. And now, Dr Simone's mind is as findable as the love I share with Lauren.
But I think I can find Dr Simone next time, even if she can hide from my telepathy somehow.
'Sorry, I didn't catch that,' I tell Tisha. She has been talking the whole time.
She gives me her best glare, which, sadly, is wasted on me. 'I am not a message girl. Sebastian said to tell you that he wants to see you. NOW.'
I nod. The girl disappears.
If Sebastian wants to see me, I can bet two pennies that it can't be good.